Shooting Their Feet
Dems demand $3.5 trillion instead of easy win
ARE Washington’s Democrats — or more precisely, the Democrats in the House of Representatives — completely bat-guano insane? After a catastrophically bad month for the man in the Oval Office, the leader of their party, they desperately need to right the ship and show Americans they can get things done.
Instead of getting practical and trying to score wins, House Democrats are trying to increase the size of their already Brobdingnagian budget bill and creating selfdestructive tensions with members of their own caucus.
As Punchbowl News reported Wednesday, “House Democrats floated a new proposal on Tuesday night that Senate Democrats and White House officials privately believe will cost more than $3.5 trillion overall . . . . At this moment, it’s House Democrats on one side, with Senate Democrats and the White House on the other.”
It’s not like the Senate Democrats are being budgetarily sober here. They have their own wish lists. Punchbowl notes that “Bernie Sanders . . . and his Senate colleagues —with backing from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — want to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare, a hugely expensive proposition.”
This is all happening at a time when President Joe Biden finds himself on the precipice. From the disaster in Afghanistan to the sobering effects of Delta variant to the August storms to rising inflation, he has both overwhelmed himself with his ineptitude and been overwhelmed by bad fortune.
The way back to political equilibrium is to look as though he has his hand on the tiller and is sensibly guiding the ship of state. He can’t do that if he and his party are getting into fist fights to determine which of them is the drunkest sailor out to blow the payday check.
Different players here have different agendas, but together they are seeking the largest expansion of government since the 1960s — when they have no mandate whatsoever to do so.
Lyndon Johnson championed and signed the Great Society programs — of which the budget package is a deliberate echo — after winning the presidency in 1964 by 22.6 points. Biden won last November by 4.4 points. His fellow Democrats held 68 seats in the Senate. Today, the Senate is literally 50-50. In 1965, House Democrats had a 155-seat majority. Right now, the Democratic majority is . . . eight.
And all this fighting may just be delusional anyway. It would take a single Democratic senator to blow up all these fantasies, and that Democratic senator has shown his hand. Joe Manchin of West Virginia published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal flatly saying he won’t vote for any $3.5 trillion bill.
What Democrats should be doing, therefore, is coming up with a budget bill that can pass. Manchin has apparently signaled he would accept a bill that features $1.5 trillion in new spending. Once upon a time, that would have seemed like the most astoundingly grandiose ask ever. Now liberal pundits and others are treating Manchin like some combination of Ron Paul and Scrooge — and they continue to argue with each other on how to make it bigger.
Manchin is doing his party a favor — indeed, he is doing many of his colleagues in the Senate and many Democrats in the House a favor, as well. He is saying no, so they don’t have to. There is a handful of senators whose futures are in peril if the bill were to pass and more than a handful of House Democrats who would be toast.
Biden won in November because he suggested he would bring competency and sanity to the White House. With the suicidal help of his fellow party members, Biden is on the verge of demonstrating for all time that incompetency comes in many forms — and so does craziness.